Book Three: Chapters I–III

O’Brien forces Winston to look in a mirror; he has completely deteriorated
and looks gray and skeletal. Winston begins to weep and blames O’Brien
for his condition. O’Brien replies that Winston knew what would
happen the moment he began his diary. O’Brien acknowledges that
Winston has held out by not betraying Julia, and Winston feels overwhelmed
with love and gratitude toward O’Brien for recognizing his strength.
However, O’Brien tells Winston not to worry, as he will soon be
cured. O’Brien then notes that it doesn’t matter, since, in the
end, everyone is shot anyhow.

Analysis: Chapters I–III

Book Two saw Winston’s love affair with Julia begin and
end. Book Three begins his punishment and “correction.” Winston’s
torture reemphasizes the book’s theme of the fundamental horror
of physical pain—Winston cannot stop the torture or prevent the
psychological control O’Brien gains from torturing him, and when
the guard smashes his elbow, he thinks that nothing in the world
is worse than physical pain. Though the Party’s ability to manipulate the
minds of its subjects is the key to the breadth of its power, its ability
to control their bodies is what makes it finally impossible to resist.

Up to this point, O’Brien has remained an enigma to the
reader, but his arrival toward the beginning of Winston’s prison
term places him firmly on the side of the Party. O’Brien seems to
have been a rebel like Winston at one point—when Winston asks if
he too has been taken prisoner, O’Brien replies, “They got me a
long time ago.” O’Brien adds insult to Winston’s imprisonment by
claiming that Winston knew all along that he was affiliated with
the Party—and Winston knows he is right. This section seems to imply
that Winston’s fatalism stems as much from his understanding of
his own fatalistic motives as from his belief in the power of the
Party. In other words, Winston’s belief that he would ultimately
be caught no matter what he did enabled him to convince himself
to trust O’Brien. He knew that he would be caught whether he trusted O’Brien
or not, and so he let himself trust O’Brien simply because he deeply
wanted to do so.

Winston’s obsession with O’Brien, which began with the
dream about the place where there is no darkness, was the source
of his undoing, and it undoes him now as well. Orwell explores the
theme of how physical pain affects the human mind, and arrives at
the conclusion that it grants extraordinary emotional power to the
person capable of inflicting the pain. Because O’Brien tortures
him, Winston perversely comes to love O’Brien. Throughout the torture
sessions, Winston becomes increasingly eager to believe anything O’Brien
tells him—even Party slogans and rhetoric. In the next section of
the novel, Winston even begins to dream about O’Brien in the same
way that he now dreams about his mother and Julia.